Remember Donna the Deer Lady, and her call to a radio talk show that electrified the nation? To refresh your memory, she was wondering why the highway department place the "Deer Crossing" signs at the busiest sections, where the deer were most likely to get hit by a moving vehicle. “Why are we encouraging deer to cross at the interstate? I don’t get it. That’s a high- traffic area,” she said. That’s exactly the kind of oddball story that grabbed me from minute one with Todd Cherches — a man equi...
Jun 11, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 626
Five short years from now, 2030 will be here—and the world of work (and life) is shapeshifting at warp speed. We're all going to have to do some serious surfing to stay afloat, let alone to participate in creating the world we want. Executive coach Anna Glynn helps sales leaders, which isn't me and probably isn't you either. But what she teaches them can help us all stay effective, engaged, and sane in the rough seas ahead. In this conversation we unpack her STRONG framework—six evidence-based l...
Jun 04, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 625
Beth Green has lived many lives: activist, Marxist, spiritual channeler, intuitive counselor, and founder of the Healing Arts Network. In this moving and provocative conversation, she shares stories from her remarkable life—beginning with her expulsion from Smith College for protesting nuclear weapons at age 16—and the wisdom she’s gained through decades of navigating political and spiritual contradictions. We explore how ego shows up in both activism and spirituality, and how Beth integrates th...
May 13, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 624
Zach Stone’s life arc runs from teenage “knucklehead” to crisis negotiator, trauma-informed facilitator, and head-of-product for thirty health-ed dev teams. In this rich, funny, and occasionally hair-raising conversation we drill down into the how of navigating chaos — on a subway platform, in a corporate boardroom, and inside your own nervous system. Trigger warning: there's a conversation about suicide at about 15 minutes into the episode. Skip to minute 17 if you want to avoid this section. H...
May 07, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 623
Garry Ridge is the former CEO of WD-40 and the co-author of Any Dumb-Ass Can Do It , a book about building high-performance cultures through servant leadership, emotional safety, and consistent values. In this conversation, Garry shares not just what he learned during his 25+ years at WD-40, but how he lived it—and how other leaders can too. We talked about what it means to lead with a heart of gold and a backbone of steel, how culture can't be microwaved (spoiler: it's a crockpot), and why bein...
Apr 16, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 622
DEI is under serious threat in a "post-Woke" world. Is it still relevant? Does it have to lead to shame? Can we promote diversity without creating zero-sum dynamics of winners and losers? Today's guest, Winitha Bonney, takes on DEI challenges with a clear and compassionate worldview grounded in empathy. Which, in her telling, is what DEI is all about. Ms Bonney helps me understand the importance of cultural context, the challenges of navigating discomfort and shame, and the ethical obligations o...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 621
Stephen Baxter lives in Tasmania, which has Tasmanian devils which sadly are nothing like the one that gave me nightmares as a little kid watching Looney Tunes cartoons on Saturday mornings. He’s a leadership mentor who promotes a style of leadership very different from the stereotypical command-and-control style of celebrated CEOs and generals: a humble, relational, and community-centered style of leadership rooted in influence, story, and service. Drawing from his diverse experience—as a forme...
Mar 26, 2025•44 min•Ep. 620
How can we create workplaces that not only support employees and leaders but also contribute positively to the world? Jess Stuart, a former high-achieving burned-out executive turned speaker and leadership coach, shares her journey from corporate burnout to studying with Buddhist monks and nuns around the world. Spoiler: she discovered, and brought back to her clients, a more sustainable and human-centered approach to work. Jess’s expertise bridges the gap between ancient wisdom and modern workp...
Mar 10, 2025•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 619
Tough times for justice, equality, inclusion, and hope these days. With the "anti-woke" attack on DEI, I was wondering how my friend Keith Edwards was doing these days. His practice is one of "aspiring allyship" — how we can all come together to learn and grow, and work for our collective liberation from all forms of tyranny and discrimination. Are businesses, cowering before the Trump/Musk onslaught, running away from diversity, equity and inclusion as fast as they can? Turns out, no. Because t...
Mar 05, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 618
John Seed was a 3-piece suit tech worker, then a meditating hippie farmer, before stumbling into his lifelong calling as an environmental activist. He participated in the world's first direct action to preserve a rain forest in the 1970s. He co-founded the Rainforest Information Center and raised money and awareness to save the "lungs of the planet." John soon realized that raising awareness wasn't going to accomplish the mission. After all, most people were aware of the damage humans were doing...
Feb 20, 2025•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 617
https://youtu.be/lqbkngcx5Qo Let's talk about persuasion! Whether in the form of sales, or a helpful coaching conversation, or "street epistemology" for a cause you care about, it's very useful to understand how human beings make decisions. Today's guest is Ian Ross, a sales trainer specializing in understanding human psychology and communication. In our conversation, Ian debunks the common misconception that effective sales techniques are inherently sleazy. Instead, he argues, sales can be all ...
Feb 11, 2025•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 616
Join me on a morning walk as I provide a stream of consciousness introduction to my latest book project while dodging traffic and pitying looks from people noticing me talking to myself with two mics attached to my jacket. The book is about triggers — what causes us to behave in ways we don't like, out of alignment with our goals and values. Like breaking our food rules or buying sh-stuff we don't need or losing our temper with family members and colleagues. This is the first of four episodes on...
Jan 30, 2025•35 min•Ep. 615
Michael Gelb returns to the podcast to talk about his latest book, Walking Well, co-written with Bruce Fertman. In our conversation, we cover a wide range of topics: the biomechanics of walking how we can powerfully improve the experience of walking through simple mindfulness and imagination exercises why walking is the quintessential human activity the benefits of walking (physical, cognitive, emotional, spiritual) other basic human postures (standing, sitting, lying down) materialist vs spirit...
Jan 22, 2025•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 614
I've been on a memory reconsolidation mission since I was first introduced to it a couple of years ago. Two missions, in fact. One, to learn as much as I can and incorporate it into my coaching and mentoring. Two, to share it far and wide. Today, we're going to talk about memory reconsolidation and some of the techniques that you can use to help bring it about for yourself and for others. My guest is my daughter Yael Zivan who has been studying memory reconsolidation and experiential therapies w...
Dec 17, 2024•53 min•Ep. 613
Well, it's getting to be that time of life when I begin to realize that I'm mortal. Next year I turn 60, which, according to the Jewish blessing "May you live to a hundred and twenty," puts me smack dab in middle age. I've been whole food plant-based for decades, and I'm pretty athletic. I meditate, and I keep a journal just in case I ever get the urge to write in it. I drink water, avoid tobacco products, drink about a quart of alcohol a year, and wear a bike helmet. So you'd think that I'd be ...
Dec 03, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 612
One of the things I love about being an executive coach and organizational consultant is how creative I get to be and how many different things I get to try. Every year, at least 10 or 20 pretty significant books on related topics get published. They talk about personal performance, about how to get people to change, how to get teams to become more effective, and how to get organizational culture to shift. Helping clients navigate change is definitely fun, but it can also feel like an infinite c...
Nov 19, 2024•54 min•Ep. 611
According to climate activist Joanna Macy, there are three stories that explain the world we're living in. The first is Business as Usual. That is, "Don't worry. Everything's fine." For example: "Global warming? No sweat — we're going to figure out how to suck carbon out of the air. No worries. The capitalist system will figure things out and the people who come up with the best, most valuable ideas will be rewarded. All is good." Sounds reasonable, especially if you consume mainstream news and ...
Nov 15, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 610
Doctors Ayesha and Dean Sherzai founded the Healthy Minds Initiative (HMI) to scale their impact on the tragic epidemic of dementia plaguing the world today. The first thing that we have to understand is that the majority of dementias are preventable through diet and lifestyle. The Sherzai's acronym NEURO—nutrition, exercise, unwinding, restorative sleep, and optimization—encapsulates the pillars that can determine our cognitive trajectory as we age. Second, individual behavior change is hard. A...
Nov 12, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 609
Lewis Bertus was following medical best practices as a physician's assistant when his wife's illness forced him to take a hard look at the limitations of the healthcare industry. The drugs weren't helping her type 2 diabetes, no matter how much her doctors insisted that the pharma route was the only responsible one. So Lewis "did his own research," which can go in all sorts of directions, some of them pretty horrifying. Fortunately, with his grounding in medicine and his deep spiritual faith, he...
Nov 05, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 608
If What Lights You Up were simply an extremely practical guide to job hunting, I wouldn't have been interested in a conversation with the author, Mary Olson-Menzel. Not that job hunting isn't an important topic — it clearly is, especially if you're out of a job or in one that's making you miserable. It's just that I wouldn't be interested in having that convo, and so I'd skip it. That said, What Lights You Up is in fact an extremely practical guide to job hunting. What piqued my interest was the...
Oct 29, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 607
Just because homelessness is a complex problem doesn't mean that there aren't simple solutions. The obstacles to ending homelessness stem from the "address homelessness" industry itself, which benefits from the persistence of the problem rather than its eradication. What's needed, according to today's guest, Momma Kai Sanders, is affordable housing. That's the root of the issue: homes that people can afford to live in. And Momma Kai isn't just talking about it. She's taking action — running for ...
Oct 24, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 606
Tom Solid and Paco Cantero are the minds behind the Paperless Movement, a consultancy and educational program for people who aspire to high performance in a fast-changing digital landscape. Which is to say, they're here to help us get shit done in a world of infinite bits and bytes, a world of 24/7 access to information, and a world which will grab our calendar by the short and curlies and impose a zillion external agendas upon us if we don't learn how to defend our time, our priorities, and our...
Oct 22, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 605
In the movie There's Something About Mary , there's a scene where Ben Stiller's character picks up a hitchhiker who tries to pitch him on a business idea. There's a popular exercise video called Eight Minute Abs, but the hitchhiker is going to capture market share by making a video called Seven Minute Abs. He explains, "If you walk into the video store and you see Eight Minute Abs and Seven Minute Abs, which one are you going to take? Seven minutes, of course. But he gets stumped by the question...
Oct 15, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 604
Thoughts on the episode? Let us know. Let's get started because we don't have a lot of time. At least that's the perspective of today's guest, Jodi Wellman. Jodi is an executive coach and speaker, and the author of You Only Die Once . And she's a big fan of Memento mori , Latin for "remember that you will die." Acknowledging the scarcity of our time, she insists, can help us make the most of the time that we have. And it doesn't have to be morbid. It can be fun. Jodi keeps skulls as decorations,...
Oct 08, 2024•59 min•Ep. 603
Thoughts on the episode? Let us know. Sarah Davis was a corporate risk manager who began to chafe at the limitations on her life. Sure, she had a safe job and a comfortable income. She ran marathons (3:38 PR — damn!) and was living the dream in Bondi, Australia. But something was missing. When Sarah interrogated herself, she realized that she wasn't living as big or as bold as she wanted. Did risk management always have to be about minimizing risk at all cost? Or could the principles of risk man...
Oct 02, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 602
Thoughts on the episode? Let us know. Over the years I've had the privilege of supporting thousands of people to make changes in their lives: entrepreneurs sharpening their focus and implementing their action plans executives growing their leadership and influence chops regular folks adopting healthy habits and uprooting self-sabotaging impulses And I like to think that the net effect of all those individual changes is a more global shift, as the ripples extend beyond my clients to their familie...
Sep 25, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 601
Thoughts on the episode? Let us know. This is the first conversation that I had with Dr Richard Hodge, and it's the fourth podcast that I've published. That's because after we talked, Richard sent me an email basically saying, "Hey, we covered some pretty advanced stuff, but I think we need to really break it down for folks." So the last three conversations with Richard have been reverse engineering our way to this conversation, the culmination (so far). This is the conversation about how to mak...
Sep 17, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 600
Thoughts on the episode? Let us know. You don't hear the word joy thrown around a lot in business. And that's why I'm delighted to share this conversation with you with business psychologist Simi Rayat. Simi is the author of the upcoming book Productivity Joy. And her thing is, are you a joy to be around at work, at home, on the streets? It's such a great question. It reminds me of my friend Howard Prager's trademark question: “How can I make someone's day?” They’re both a sort of mantra that al...
Sep 11, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 599
Thoughts on the episode? Let us know. In this conversation, the brilliant Dr. Richard Hodge (aren't you glad you live in a universe that includes him?) introduces the four quadrant model as a way of clarifying and codifying our approach to complex problems. Before we get into it, I wanna say: This is high-level stuff. It's meaty (ok, seitan-y) and will take a while for most folks to digest. (I'm still working on it after being introduced to Richard's work over 3 months ago.) And it's the real de...
Sep 02, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 598
Thoughts on the episode? Let us know. What can we learn from indigenous knowledge systems about how to navigate and transform our world? My guest, Dr Richard Hodge, points out several aspects of Aboriginal culture that can help us act effectively and with heart and wisdom in a world full of problems. To guide us in a complex world, we need touchstones of value. For many indigenous peoples, that's the function of totems and totemic beings: kangaroo, echidna, wallaby, and so on. Counterintuitively...
Aug 26, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 597
